• About the Work of Art

• About the Artist
   

   

Looking and Discussing
Grade: 6–8; 9–12
Subject: Visual Art, Language Arts, Social Studies

Impressions of Woman of the High Plains

See Student Activity: Visual Elements of Photography

• Have students consider the image for a few minutes. Then ask them to discuss their personal responses to Lange’s photograph. Compare observations and responses.

• What is the subject matter of this photograph? What can you determine about the woman and her surroundings from this image? What is your emotional response when looking at this photograph? What senses respond to this image? What might you hear, smell, and feel?

• Pay attention to the camera angle. Where did Lange position the camera in relation to the woman, and how does this affect the viewer’s response to the image? How would a different camera angle change the feeling and composition of the image?

• Compare Lange’s camera angle with Luther Smith’s in Bullrider 1985, High School Rodeo, Mineral Wells, TX or to David Barry’s Sitting Bull. How does camera angle affect viewer response in each?

Reading and Research
Grade: 6–8; 9–12
Subject: Visual Art, Language Arts, Social Studies

Woman of the High Plains

• Read the poem written about Woman of the High Plains by Michael Jennings that follows this section. Then discuss his interpretation of the photograph. Do you agree or disagree with his profile of this woman? Why or why not?

• Read excerpts from the book Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp to get a better sense about the circumstances surrounding the lives of those living through the dust bowl era. This book is available for loan from the Teaching Resource Center.

• Read from the book Dorothea Lange by Robyn Montana Turner to learn more about the life of the photographer. Write a report about the artist.
  

Woman of the High Plains, Texas Panhandle. 1938
by Michael Jennings

She stands, her long bones dark against the sky,
one hand on neck, the other pressed to her brow,
and she is laughing, as though out of nowhere
something had just dawned, as though somehow
something besides wind had passed through here
on its way to the mountains.
Listen:
out here the strained hollow faces of summer
grow stranger in winter, the moth-clouds get eaten
by bats from the north, and the long faces of worry
become the low eyeless dwellings of the horizon,
some small smoke rising from the chimneys.
Listen:
no one alive shall ever hear this laugh, or see
a woman in a flour sack with the posture of a heron
laugh like a child.

Behind her the bleak plain
lies echoless, where even the bird-call of her bones
shall die
under the bright clear rain of the million stars.

 

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